from the a-time-to-build dept

Use The Failures Of The Past As Inspiration For A Better Future

Look, I get it. The world is a mess. Important institutions are crumbling. It feels like both the tech and political worlds are collaborating to squeeze all remaining humanity out of all of us. Cynicism is ascendant. Nihilism is the new black.

And yet: I remain optimistic.

Not the naive, everything-will-work-out-fine kind of optimism. The kind grounded in seeing what’s actually happening beneath the surface-level chaos. Because while legacy institutions are capitulating and folding, others are standing up and speaking out. And more importantly, people are building alternatives that route around the failures entirely.

This is the pattern: centralized systems fail, people figure out how to build around them. We’ve seen it before. We’ll see it again. The difference this time is that we’re building with the knowledge of how those systems failed baked in from the start.

Every year, my final post on Techdirt is about optimism. For the past decade, I’ve felt like I needed to apologize for it. Not this year. At the lowest points, you need optimism. Things are a mess. But let’s roll up our sleeves and fix stuff. And it’s easier to maintain that optimism when you can see the concrete alternatives already taking shape, even if only in their earliest forms.

If you want to see the past final posts of the year, they’re here:

• 2008: On Staying Happy
• 2009: Creativity, Innovation And Happiness
• 2010: From Pessimism To Optimism… And The Power Of Innovation
• 2011: From Optimism And Innovation… To The Power To Make A Difference
• 2012: Innovation, Optimism And Opportunity: All Coming Together To Make Real Change
• 2013: Optimism On The Cusp Of Big Changes
• 2014: Change, Innovation And Optimism, Despite Challenges
• 2015: Keep Moving Forward
• 2016: No One Said It Would Be Easy…
• 2017: Keep On Believing
• 2018: Do Something Different
• 2019: Opportunities Come From Unexpected Places
• 2020: Make The World A Better Place
• 2021: The Arc Of The Moral Universe Is A Twisty Path
• 2022: The Opportunity To Build A Better Internet Is Here. Right Now.
• 2023: Moving Fast And Breaking Things Is The Opposite Of Tech Optimism
• 2024: The Biggest Challenges Create The Biggest Opportunities

Earlier this month, with some friends, we launched the Resonant Computing Manifesto—a framework for building tech that empowers rather than extracts, that resonates with what people actually want rather than what some corporation or politician decides they should have.

The response was overwhelming. Over and over we heard from people who’d been thinking similar thoughts but didn’t realize how many others shared them. That’s how movements start: not with grand pronouncements, but with the realization that you’re not alone in seeing what needs to change.

A movement comes about as more and more people realize things that need to change and need to be fixed and then step up and say “hey, we can be a part of the process of fixing things.” It’s not easy. It doesn’t happen overnight. There’s no silver bullet.

But you can move things in the direction of change towards a better system. And as more people join in, real change is possible.

Take politics. People are rightfully upset about the direction things are heading, in the US and globally. But the backlash is producing politicians who believe in actually helping people over accumulating power. That matters.

And, similarly, for all the reasonable fears about giant tech companies working hand in hand with authoritarians, we’re seeing that kick off the processes that will enable more people to take more control over their own lives, and away from those collaborators.

Or take AI. Yes, the slop is real and the hype is exhausting. But the same tools the giants are using to flood the internet with garbage can be turned against them. I’ve spent this year building personalized tools that work for me without handing my data to corporations for their benefit over mine. You can take back control from the billionaires. The tools exist.

This matters more now that we’ve watched centralized systems and power-hungry billionaires get co-opted by authoritarian regimes. But we can use the tools of innovation to empower ourselves over them.

It’s also why I remain incredibly bullish on the work being done on open social networks like Bluesky (where I’m on the board). This year may have felt slower than the year before, but there are so many exciting developments happening where people are building amazing tools and systems without having to rely on billionaires or ask for permission.

This feels like the early internet, when you could just build something and see what happened. But we’re smarter now. We’ve seen how centralized systems become capture points for authoritarians. We know the failure modes. So we’re building with that knowledge baked in—creating systems that are, by design, resistant to the kind of control we’ve watched corrupt the previous generation of platforms.

The mess that we’re in today on both the tech and political vectors should be seen as a guide to where we need to go and what needs to be done. The seeds have already been planted and many folks are already building. The optimistic viewpoint is that this movement will continue to grow and more people will continue to see how they, too, don’t need to be held back by the whims of billionaires and authoritarians, but can use the tools of innovation for their own interests.

As always, my final thoughts on these posts are thanking all of you, the community around Techdirt, for making all of this worthwhile—and this year in particular for coming out to support our fundraiser and our continued existence. The community remains an amazing thing to me. I’ve said in the past that I write as if I’m going to share my thoughts into an empty void, not expecting anyone to ever pay attention, and I’m always amazed when anyone does, whether it’s to disagree with me, add some additional insights, challenge my thinking, or reach out to talk about how to actually move some ideas forward.

I know this community is full of creators, thinkers and advocates who care deeply about using technology to make the world better. Let’s use this opportunity to prove that innovation, thoughtfully applied, can route around institutional failure and corruption. Once again, thank you to those who are reading this for making Techdirt such a wonderful and special place, and let’s focus on being truly optimistic about the opportunities in front of us.